Micheal Mann's homage to Charles & Ray Eames' Power of Ten
In classic Westerns, the heroes wore white hats, while the villains wore black, making it easy to tell them apart. The world's gone blurry in Michael Mann's "Blackhat," (premiere: today, 01.16.2015) a surprisingly inelegant yet breathlessly up-to-the-minute thriller -- as well as a newfangled "Eastern," strategically set mostly in China, Indonesia andMalaysia -- in which the FBI recruits an incarcerated hacker to help thwart an international cyber-terrorist. The weak link in a busy January weekend, Universal's export-ready offering may not look like much, though powered by criminal stunts that make last month's Sony breach seem amateur, plus action scenes punchy enough to justify the price of admission, it could hardly be called hackwork.
In the 20 years between "Thief" and "Ali," the visually oriented helmer set a look that other directors have emulated, but these days, we can feel him struggling to keep up with the times. Aesthetics still matter, which is obvious from the opening sequence: a purely cinematic attempt to dramatize a cyber-attack, starting from the macro and then plunging down to the most microscopic level. The Universal logo yields to a view of the Earth from space, featuring the globe aglow with crisscrossing lines of communication; then we zoom in, first to China, then to the Chai Wan Nuclear Power Plant, until the camera passes through a computer terminal to the network of wires, motherboards and pulsing white packets of sinister code.
Via BostonHerald.com at:
